Competent and good are not synonyms. Smart and good are not synonyms. Evil and competent are not synonyms. Virtues are not all moral virtues. Bravery is a morally neutral virtue. It makes bad people worse, and good people better and without it all virtues and vices are nearly meaningless. Competence is morally neutral. It is […]

Those of you who have been following this blog for awhile know that I hate to clean my house. Some people are positively orgasmic about clean houses and waste take a lot of time getting everything perfect and perfectly dirt free. These people are a mystery to me and anyway, perfection is unattainable. (I keep telling myself this.) Recognizing the deficiency of clean genes in my genotype, I have to resort to trickery. In other words, I download a book from audible and go to town on my floor or stove, distracting myself from whatever mind numbing chore there is to do. Jo Nesbo has been my recent author du jour when I have to whip out the sponges and Comet. But yesterday, when my audible credits renewed, I decided to take a look around for some different entertainment. That’s when I saw this blurb for Glenn Beck’s newest “novel”, Agenda 21:

Just a generation ago this place was called America. Now, after the worldwide implementation of UN-lead program called Agenda 21, it’s simply known as the ‘Republic’. There is no president. No congress. No Supreme Court. No freedom.

There are only the Authorities.

Citizens have two primary goals in the new Republic: to create clean energy and to create new human life.

Those who cannot do either are of no use to society.

This bleak and barren existence is all that 18-year-old Emmeline has ever known. She dutifully walks her energy board daily and accepts all male pairings assigned to her by the Authorities. Like most citizens, she keeps her head down and her eyes closed.

Until the day they came for her mother.

Woken up to the harsh reality of her life and her family’s future inside the Republic, Emmeline begins to search for the truth. Why are all citizens confined to ubiquitous concrete living spaces? Why are Compounds guarded by Gatekeepers who track all movements? Why are food, water and energy rationed so strictly? And, most important, why are babies taken from their mothers at birth?

As Emmeline begins to understand the true objectives of Agenda 21, she realizes that she is up against far more than she ever thought. With the Authorities closing in, and nowhere to run, Emmeline embarks on an audacious plan to save her family and expose the Republic – but is she already too late?

:-^

I like the term “UN-lead”. Is that Simon and Schuster’s subtle way of saying that it secretly thinks we should use unleaded gasoline or a punny commentary on the unenforceability of the agenda or are those ironic interpretations just artifacts of the non-conspiratorialist’s rational mind? Or is it like the word “unionize”? To a bunch of Walmart workers, it means solidarity for better wages and working conditions. To the chemist it means neutralizing a substance. But I’m getting off track here.

I didn’t know anything about the real Agenda 21 initiative, which the US is a major signatory to. So I looked it up. It’s a voluntary initiative by the UN to promote sustainable development with the goal of reducing the impact of human activity on biodiversity and climate. Oh, and also there’s some stuff in there about making sure women and other diverse populations don’t get stomped on by the white male affirmative action plan that’s been going on for the last 10,000 years or so. Not only is it voluntary and a set of proposed standards, but since it’s not a treaty, the Senate hasn’t even taken up discussion of it in Congress. This is the big threat to the nation.

Obviously, it’s a socialist plot, according to Beck. Capitalism is apparently incapable of pulling off greater equality between the genders or decreasing dependence on a finite resource like petroleum so the socialists have to do it and conscript the unwilling American population into its wicked program for less pollution and more fairness. The point of this book appears to be to argue that leaving things just the way they are with more and more people taking a back seat to oil money and power while keeping their place in the natural order of things, as miserable as that might be, is better than evolving. It’s a little like trying to take the pro side of the debate on venereal disease at the High School Forensics Club meeting.

Glenn Beck is a brave man. Cunning, manipulative, reckless and willfully ignorant, but brave. Or maybe he’s just enough of a big name that any stupid nonsense he writes will guarantee an audience to a major publisher. Where is the UN-lead initiative for equalizing the playing field with regard to getting published? Now *that’s* the kind of agenda that would give Beck the willies for sure.

While I was going through the spam filter last night, I ran across a link from a site that doesn’t deserve any additional attention that asked whether I was a secret Tea Party person because I questioned why the people of New Jersey should only get back $.60 for every dollar we send to Washington. I think the site manager misunderstands my comment about taxes, deliberately, so as to mislead his merry band of Tea Party followers.

I don’t mind paying my taxes. What I object to is a bunch of red states or red mentalities constantly interfering in our ability as a nation to evolve. Not only do they interfere, they seem to take perverse pleasure in keeping the nation in an arrested state of development. It’s a power trip without any purpose whatsoever. That’s what I object to. I object to Alabama taking our money and then spitting in our face and telling us that government is no good. I object to the south not taxing its own people effectively while at the same time making sure that the underpaid in their states are treated as persons deserving neither respect nor dignity and then exporting that attitude to the rest of the country.

The Tea Party is notorious for collecting followers that express a wide variety of miserable, hard hearted, nasty, unkind, selfish greedy behaviors towards their fellow Americans. My anger is fairly typical of people in the coastal populations, rich in diversity and probably better educated, who can see that the country is being left behind by the actions of a mindless mob of mean spirited, religious, conformists who let people like Glenn Beck interfere with their thinking processes.

If they’re so worried about the horrors of Agenda 21, just let them leave already. No, seriously. I think the rest of us have had enough. Emigrate to Iraq or Russia or some other place where there are no rules or regulations to prevent testosterone poisoned capitalists from doing whatever the hell they want. Let them see how natural law operates when there are no better angels to restrain it. It’s time that liberals toughened up and stopped being so damned accommodating or apologizing for our rational desire for regulation and restraint on the turbo charged financiers.

The Tea Partiers don’t want to live in one nation. (And no, that is no tribute to Barack Obama who wouldn’t know a sincere sentiment if it hit him in the face) They want to continue on with a perpetual war against reality and modernity because they can’t see the iron fist of the uber wealthy pulling their strings. Their power is going to wane anyway but not before they cause irreparable harm to the country they claim to love. I challenge that assumption. I don’t think they love this country. They are in love with their power. If they don’t like taxes or government, let them give back the $.40 per dollar that New Jersey sends to them. We’ve got a bill for Sandy that’s going to run about $30,000,000,000. We don’t have time for tribulationalist fantasies about voluntary UN initiatives that propose to make the world cleaner, more energy efficient or fairer to most of its people. Only people like Glenn Beck would see that kind of society as some kind of dystopia.

Body: Last week I went down to Washington, D.C. to deliver a paper at a conference in the technical field where I worked, ten years or so and two or three careers ago, before the dot.com trash. The trip was solely an exercise in merit-making, since I doubt very much I'll get work in the field, but reconnecting with old friends was really great -- even […]

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